The New Sobriety

Elise Vazquez, a marketing manager at New York City-based law
firm Kaye Scholer LLP, has experienced three bomb scares since
Sept. 11 â€” at work, on the subway and in the commuter train
she takes between Manhattan and New Jersey. She's become accustomed
to the sound of fire engines and the sight of soldiers in fatigues
searching vehicles. â€œIt's always with you; the feeling that
something can happen,â€? she says. â€œThe threats are now
part of my routine.â€?

While Vazquez has found a new routine since the assault on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon, Tracy Schroth, a writer in
Berkeley, Calif., has reverted to some of her old ways. â€œLife
here is generally as it's always been,â€? she says. Still, even
Schroth admits some things have changed: â€œThere's a lot less
traffic going in and out of San Francisco, even during rush hour.
I'm spending more time at home, and so are many of my
friends.â€?

Have our common sensibilities, attitudes, behaviors changed
since Sept. 11? How have threats of anthrax at home and the
potential for a protracted military campaign abroad affected daily
life? In order to understand the social, demographic and economic
implications of recent events, we focused this month's special
report on shifting attitudes in five areas: family, work, religion,
entertainment and the role of patriotism in business. For four of
the five sections, we commissioned exclusive nationwide surveys.
Our goal: to go beyond the snapshot view of a moment in time, and
try to identify long-lasting change, both in people's daily lives
and in their underlying beliefs.

In this issue, we explore which changes are new, and which were
accelerated by Sept. 11 events, to help businesses understand
consumer behavior patterns. Although many people believe that
â€œeverything changedâ€? on Sept. 11, a new sense of
sobriety was already simmering in many segments of society before
Osama bin Laden became a household name. In July, for example,
Yankelovich Partners found that more Baby Boomers than ever were
thinking about slowing down the pace of their lives, while the
percentage of Gen X women agreeing that their career was not as
rewarding as they expected jumped 13 points from three years
earlier. And, as this month's Pulse section on the economic outlook
shows, consumer confidence was skidding downward even before the
attacks.

It's always dangerous to speculate on the long-term consequences
of dramatic events, especially those as searing as on Sept. 11.
Still, the concerns for security and stability, and the elevation
of uniformed public servants such as firefighters and police
officers into national heroes, seem to present an undeniably vivid
contrast with the celebrity-driven cultural focus of the '90s with
its â€œrealityâ€? programming underside, and the money
quest of the late great Bull Market. Although it will be up to
economists and historians to provide a more definitive perspective
on the consequences of the attacks in the years to come, we hope
we've provided businesses with a road map to the months ahead.